Some space in this column yesterday was devoted to answering the gloom-sayers over at the New York Times, who had complained in a Christmas editorial that “Americans are working harder, but taking home less.” It’s worth returning to the point this morning because of the release of a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper, by Peter Kuhn of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Fernando Lozano of Pomona College, puts these claims in perspective. It is titled, “The Expanding Workweek? Understanding Trends in Long Work Hours Among U.S. Men, 1979-2004.”

To begin with, it’s impossible to honestly pin this one on President Bush or even the Republican Congress. Lozano and Kuhn found “a decline between 1940 and 1970 in the share of employed 25-64-year-old men who worked more than 48 hours in the Census week, followed by a rise between 1970 and 1990.” Nor is it the case that all Americans are working harder, or that those who are working harder are taking home less. The economists write, “long work hours were much more common among college graduates than among workers with less education; the increase in long hours was also much greater among the college-educated. In fact, our data show no increase in long work hours among high school dropouts at all.” And they say that “the recent increase in long work hours has been concentrated among the highest wage earners: between 1979 and 2002, the frequency of long work hours increased by 14.4 percentage points among the top quintile of wage earners, while falling by 6.7 percentage points in the lowest quintile.”

So how about those harder working men? Is it true, as the Times claims, that they are “taking home less”? Quoth the economists: “we argue that skilled, salaried US men experienced a compensated real wage increase between 1979 and 2002.” In other words, those Americans who are working harder are taking home more. So much for the Times’s attempt to inject some gloom into Christmas.